There is a silver lining here though. If Mt Gox or someone else would decide (and manage) to raise the needed capital, now or whenever, to take this step, they will have to recover those costs from their customers. This could have the effect of a "tobin tax" putting a brake on excessive speculation if there is a, say 10% commission to be paid. And still it wouldnt completely disallow people from joining or leaving the bitcoin economy.

The only problem is of course that no one is going to pay 10% as long as there are other, unregulated markets that do it for almost nothing and you can rest assured the gamblers will just move to the caymans or wherever.

I know it's not simple but what stops you guys to get licensed as a financial institution to be able to have other people deposit/withdraw funds from your accounts?

The answer is part of your question. It is not simple and it is very expensive. In general, if you do it you make bitcoin part of the fiat world. This has to be avoided!

I hate to say it, but by definition all exchanges are part of "the fiat world". The whole point of exchanges is to provide a gateway through which the great majority of us that get paid in "fiat currency" can explore the possibilities of BitCoin. If you want no part of "the fiat world", then any issues the exchangers are running into would be irrelevant to you anyhow as they would have no value.

Because of this, all exchanges by definition have one foot in BitCoin and one foot in "standard currencies", and must be friendly to each (or try hard not to attract notice). Unfortunately, it sounds like various governments are hacking at one of the feet, for rather good reasons from their point of view (according to where that one foot is "standing"). Whether this is an attempt to knock the exchangers over or not (or even if the "bitcoin" side of this has even been noticed) is an open question, the exposure and bubble that we just went through probably didn't help much here.

There is a silver lining here though. If Mt Gox or someone else would decide (and manage) to raise the needed capital, now or whenever, to take this step, they will have to recover those costs from their customers. This could have the effect of a "tobin tax" putting a brake on excessive speculation if there is a, say 10% commission to be paid. And still it wouldnt completely disallow people from joining or leaving the bitcoin economy.

The only problem is of course that no one is going to pay 10% as long as there are other, unregulated markets that do it for almost nothing and you can rest assured the gamblers will just move to the caymans or wherever.

Alternatively I am sure plenty of islands in the Caribbean would be happy to take their business (and tax revenue). For smaller players this may not be an option but Mt. Gox is a market leader and thus has more resources and more future revenue to lose.

Alternatively I am sure plenty of islands in the Caribbean would be happy to take their business (and tax revenue).

These are the questions I've been asking... how hard would it be to establish an exchange in such places? I guess the worst part would be to get costumers money in and out, but how difficult would it be? Maybe it's a feasible option... I have no idea, just wondering...

Alternatively I am sure plenty of islands in the Caribbean would be happy to take their business (and tax revenue). For smaller players this may not be an option but Mt. Gox is a market leader and thus has more resources and more future revenue to lose.

The whole point of establishing a presence in Europe was to offer SEPA to their European customers. There are already plenty of ways to get money in and out of the exchanges by going through third party processors but people living in Europe wanted a quick and easy way to deposit and withdraw money from the exchanges. SEPA offered that. People don't want to have to fuck around with the whole bank account > payment processor > MtGox thing to deposit and they especially don't want to have to fuck around with the same process in reverse to withdraw.

The online gambling sites didn't just go offshore, they also routed their customers' funds through third party processors. That was the point of vulnerability when the US Department of Justice went after the online gambling sites which had been allowing US customers to play - they went after the third party processors and large amounts of player funds which were in the accounts of the payment processors were frozen.

There are already offshore exchanges - TradeHill is one - the issue is being able to offer users quick and uncomplicated methods of depositing and withdrawing their funds without running into legal problems.

All I can say is that this is Bitcoin. I don't believe it until I see six confirmations.

I don't know but every time I visit Grand Cayman I see lots of very large banks in shiney buildings with plenty of pleasant english speaking staff. Doesn't seem very hard for rich Americans to move tens of millions of dollars there. Granted somewhere like Caymans likely would require some kind of license but the difference is they might actually want your business where an established country like US or France the license exists to stifle and limit competition.

I don't know but every time I visit Grand Cayman I see lots of very large banks in shiney buildings with plenty of pleasant english speaking staff. Doesn't seem very hard for rich Americans to move tens of millions of dollars there. Granted somewhere like Caymans likely would require some kind of license but the difference is they might actually want your business where an established country like US or France the license exists to stifle and limit competition.

Rich people are happy to pay for wire transfers to move their money. People wanting to deposit $50 with an exchange or withdraw $100 from it don't want to pay $30 or more for an international wire transfer - and I suspect that an awful lot of people are conducting those kind of small transactions based on what gets posted on the forum. People want a cheap method of getting money in and out of their exchange accounts but they also want it to be rapid. It's easy to provide one or the other but a little more challenging to come up with a method which combines both.

To some extent, I think there's a bit of a conflict in what users want from exchanges and wallet services. On the one hand, they want them to be based in locations where they're transparent and accountable and on the other hand they want them to offer the benefits which operating offshore provide.

All I can say is that this is Bitcoin. I don't believe it until I see six confirmations.

If you want bitcoins, start selling goods or services for bitcoins. If you want to get rid of your bitcoins, buy good or services with them. If you have no interest in either, then bitcoin isnt for you.

Besides Coffee and Hosting services this is what I found worth spending Bitcoins on:

Why? Its not because banking laws in these countries protect (to some extent) banking privacy that they would have no regulation of financial institutions. I wouldnt be surprised if in fact regulation would be more strict and it would be more difficult to operate there than, say france.

because banking laws in these countries protect (to some extent) banking privacy

They don't, not anymore. They gave up information to USA and sold databases to Germany (and no, please don't tell me that was some rogue employee who stole a CD from the datacenter, I know enough security to realize that it's much more common that Germany put a lot of pressure on the banks and then bribed them).

I wouldn't consider banking as being private anywhere in the world anymore.